Dictionary of Literary Biography on Anna Katharine Green

During the nineteenth century Anna Katharine Green Rohlfs was an internationally known writer of detective fiction whose works were translated into at least five languages and who was admired by literary critics such as Walter Besant and politicians such as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and future prime minister of England Stanley Baldwin. Between the two world wars, however, her books were unread and forgotten. Feminist critics have subsequently revived her reputation as they have rediscovered how her originality, intriguing plots, and invention of the first series detectives--including two stereotype-defying women investigators--won respectability for mystery fiction among the middle class and helped shape future development of the genre. Her commentaries on class and ethnic differences, particularly in the New York area with which she was intimately familiar, provide a strong moral and social vision that Patricia D. Maida identifies as stemming from Green's Calvinist antecedents. Like many of her...